‘This will creep its way under your skin and stay there long after you finish the final few gut-twisting chapters. Brilliant’ Heat

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Brighton Beach, 1993

Teenagers Nell and Jude find the body of a young woman and when no one comes to claim her, she becomes known as the Brighton Mermaid. Nell is still struggling to move on when, three weeks later, Jude disappears.

Twenty-five years on, Nell is forced to quit her job to find out who the Brighton Mermaid really was – and what happened to her best friend that summer.

But as Nell edges closer to the truth, dangerous things start to happen. Someone seems to be watching her every move, and soon she starts to wonder who in her life she can actually trust…

Fast-paced and thrilling, The Brighton Mermaid explores the deadly secrets of those closest to you.

Crime Fiction is one of my favourite genres, but after reading so many books about the subject I felt like a bit of a breather.

I’ve read books by Dorothy Koomson before and really enjoyed them so when this title appeared as a Kindle offer I snapped it up thinking it would be a good contemporary novel of the human interest variety. Well yes it is that but also so much more. Oh yes and it’s also a crime fiction novel!

Pure serendipity and I’m really glad that I chose to read it because it kept me enthralled throughout.

One of those books were you are just in awe of the writing and wonder how on Earth the author came up with such an excellent plot.

I’m a bit of a genealogy freak too so having one of the main characters research family trees in an effort to find out the identity of a young deceased woman her and her friend discovered on Brighton beach was a bonus for me. I was SO meant to read this book!

There’s a lot going on within the novel and one particular aspect was how the discovery of a body and the impact and fall out from that affected three families in a devastating way throughout decades of their lives.

Dorothy Koomson is the award-winning author of 14 novels and has been making up stories since she was 13 when she used to share her stories with her convent school friends. Her published titles include: The Friend, When I Was Invisible, That Girl From Nowhere, The Flavours of Love, The Woman He Loved Before, Goodnight, Beautiful and The Chocolate Run.

Dorothy’s first novel, The Cupid Effect, was published in 2003 (when she was quite a bit older than 13). Her third book, My Best Friend’s Girl, was selected for the Richard & Judy Summer Reads of 2006 and went on to sell over 500,000 copies. While her fourth novel, Marshmallows For Breakfast, has sold in excess of 250,000 copies. Dorothy’s books, The Ice Cream Girls and The Rose Petal Beach were both shortlisted for the popular fiction category of the British Book Awards in 2010 and 2013, respectively.

Dorothy’s novels have been translated into over 30 languages, and a TV adaptation loosely based on The Ice Cream Girls was shown on ITV1 in 2013. After briefly living in Australia, Dorothy now lives in Brighton.